Every system that seeks to establish authoritarian control over the people first seeks to silence dissenting views. Anyone who deviates at all for the leftist orthodoxy, especially liberals, person is guilty until proven innocent beyond a reasonable doubt. And maybe still then. It is a legal standard recognizable in every totalitarian system, from the National Socialists to the Russian and Chinese Communists, from the Ancien Régime to Cuba's rounding up hundreds of thought-crime dissidents so Obama's visit wouldn't be marred by facts. So it is today. This book will infuriate people who believe in free speech, including true liberals. It will enrage the illiberal left, as Powers terms them, who believe that their agenda is so obviously correct and that anyone who deviates from it on even one point must be shamed with name calling (the first technique of propaganda), intimidated, silenced, demeaned, and punished through losing their livelihood if at all possible. Academics with impeccable progressive credentials are forced to grovel and apologize at the feet of the thought-police. She cites the case of Mozella firing Brendan Eich as CEO in 2014 because he contributed $1,000 to California's campaigning opposing gay marriage in 2008 (a position that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton held at the time). Power's supported gay marriage, as did I, but we both opposed silencing dissent.

Powers, who is a Fox News correspondent, cites the attempt on the left to delegitimize Fox as a news organization. A Pew Research review of the coverage in from September 6 to October 16, 2008, found that Fox's on Obama were 40% negative, and on McCain were 40% negative. Compare that to CNN where it was 39% negative for Obama vs. 69% negative for McCain, or MSNBC where 14% on Obama were negative compared to 73% on McCain. For being balanced, the White House tried to shut Fox out of coverage on several occasions. She points out that in his first term, Obama, of "The most transparent administration in history" held 79 press conferences, compared to 89 for George Bush, 133 for Clinton, and 143 for George H. W. Bush. (P-132)

Powers says that, "...illiberal feminism is often driven by a base hatred of Christianity. Amanda Marcotte, a feminist who writes for Slate and The Guardian, once posted this "joke" on her blog:

Q: What if Mary had taken plan B after the Lord filled her with the hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You'd have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology." (P-163)

Powers says, "For liberals (she considers herself one) free speech is a fundamental value. Debate is a good thing. So is tolerance of different viewpoints. But the illiberal feminists and the illiberal left reject the ideas of free speech and tolerance. They believe that views that don't align with theirs should be silenced." (P-169). She cites numerous maddening examples.

On Page 196, she says, "Remember, the same illiberal feminists who think it's no big deal to kick an innocent man out of college, trash his reputation, and harm his job prospects on the basis of false accusations are also likely to think that if a woman has to walk past an anti-abortion demonstration on campus she has suffered grievous harm."

I suggest reading the book in small doses to keep your blood pressure under control.

Excerpt: Sen. Ted Cruz has locked up the support of 21 total Colorado delegates to the Republican National Convention, representing a majority of the delegates the state will send to Cleveland in July. Slates loyal to Cruz won every assembly in Colorado's seven congressional districts, which began April 2 and culminated Friday with 12 delegates selected. The Texas senator is well-positioned to pad his total Saturday, when 13 more delegates will be chosen at Colorado Republicans' state convention.

Excerpt: Ted Cruz added to his lead in Colorado, winning three more national delegates Thursday to boost his total to nine. The Texas senator found deep support at the 7th Congressional District convention in Arvada among pledged and unpledged delegates, much like he did Saturday when he swept all six slots award at two conventions.

Of the three alternates selected, two are committed Cruz supporters and one, Jefferson County GOP Chair Don Ytterberg, is unpledged. Donald Trump supporters organized a slate of three candidates for the 7th District convention — the first overt signs of organization from the campaign in Colorado — but still struck out.

Excerpt: Contrast this with the Cruz campaign, which has been almost entirely free of such problems. Cruz’s team has been working tirelessly to secure delegates who will be likely to turn to him on a second or third vote at a contested convention. Those efforts have been sufficiently fruitful that, for instance, Cruz is apt to walk away with ten more delegates than Trump in Louisiana — a state that Trump won. Cruz swept both of the Colorado congressional districts that held their conventions this week, securing six more delegates for July, and an unaffiliated alternate delegate from ArapahoeCounty told MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin that Cruz’s ground game is “extraordinary.” Likewise, a Republican operative in Arizona says that Cruz’s is the only campaign organizing aggressively in the state.

Excerpt: In Wisconsin, a majority of Republican voters said they would be concerned or scared if Trump were elected President. That is a terrible sign. To overcome all these things, Trump has to grow up and look Presidential. He has to lose the bombast.

His campaign now has him on track to give a series of policy speeches. They say he will focus on immigration and foreign policy. But he has thus far come off as ill prepared for interviews on policy. Just before Wisconsin he had a terrible foray into abortion policy.

William Bennett, one of Ronald Reagan’s education secretaries, has been advising Trump. He told the Washington Post, “I and others have offered to help, but [it] doesn’t seem to make any difference.” It does not. It is hard to tell a man no who has intentionally surrounded himself with those who only tell him yes.

Worth Reading: Trump People Aren’t Afraid Convention Will Be Stolen, They’re Afraid It WON’T Be

Excerpt: Donald Trump and his surrogates and his spokespeople and his supporters and his fans and his, I don’t know … his dog, they are all, everyone aboard the Trump train, professing a fear or an outrage that the election is being “stolen” from Trump. This fear/outrage is based on two things: 1) Some people haven’t yet knelt before their god-king, which is very unacceptable to cult members and 2) Trump is failing to secure enough delegates to walk in as the winner in Cleveland. These are, course, dumb reasons. The point of contention is obviously the second one: the delegates. If Trump doesn’t arrive in Cleveland with a majority, ie. 1,237 delegates, then on the first ballot he won’t get the nomination. There will be a second ballot. And that is what is (theoretically) causing the Trump fans to spasm into fits of apoplexy and issue threats of storming delegate hotel rooms in anger. Right off the bat that raises a question. Why are they so sure that Trump won’t get votes on the second ballot? I mean, that’s what they are conceding isn’t it? That once not bound, the elected delegates, chosen from among the people to represent the people, will absolutely not back Trump. That’s what they are saying. Trump’s supporters are saying that.

Excerpt: Levin attributed his #NeverTrump conversion to the sleazy tactics of Trump thug Roger Stone, who he says put out an obscure article claiming he was bought and paid for by the Establishment, simply because the Senate Conservative Fund bought copies of his books to promote membership a couple of years ago.

Excerpt: The past three and a half weeks have not been kind to Donald Trump. Marco Rubio’s departure narrowed the Republican race to 3 candidates – realistically, two – and voters have turned their focus from the contest among the not-Trumps to the question of whether the party can or should nominate Trump. In the three states to hold a popular vote since March 15, Ted Cruz has beaten Trump 43.4% to 36.6% (with 13.2% for John Kasich) in the popular vote, and 76-64 in the delegate race. The offstage delegate race has been even worse: the Green Papers lists the tally so far from American Samoa, North Dakota, Colorado and Wyoming’s remaining delegates as 14 unpledged delegates supporting Cruz, 1 supporting Trump, 28 uncommitted and 48 yet to be awarded (a number of those starting today in Colorado, where Trump’s campaign is already all but conceding defeat).

Excerpt: 1) Trump has favorability ratings that make him unelectable: The American public is very familiar with Donald Trump and people hate his guts. Trump’s current favorable/unfavorable rating is 34/58. Just as a point of comparison, the two biggest landslides in history were against Jimmy Carter (33/58) and Walter Mondale (34/40). Trump is so unpopular with the general electorate that we might as well be running Jared Fogle or Bill Cosby.

Excerpt: She told the Post: 'There was the divorce, there was the scandal, and American women loved me and hated him. 'So there was no way that he would go into [politics] at that point. But he was always tooling around with the idea.' She was referring to Trump's infidelity with Marla Marples that pushed the couple apart in 1991. Ivana told Barbara Walters in a 1991 '20/20' interview that Maples stopped her at a restaurant in Aspen and told her, 'I'm Marla and I love your husband. Do you?' Ivana filed for divorce, claiming in her deposition that Donald raped her after he used her plastic surgeon for a scalp-reduction surgery to remove a bald spot.

Trump Voters Are Not The People We Thought They Were. By Erick Erickson

Excerpt: At the end of the day we are left with a deep irony within Trump voters' views. The groups most likely to fight the establishment Republicans who Trump voters hate are being labeled as establishment for also opposing Trump. So we're left with the actual Republican Establishment and Trump voters working together to shut out conservative reformers who are championing the very causes Trump voters claim they believe in.

More Evidence That Much of Trump’s Social Media Support is Fake. By Erick Erickson

Excerpt: It appears someone has put “bots” on the payroll to tweet, retweet, and no doubt harass others. Many of them use pictures of people as if they are those people. But they’re not. They are computers designed to harass, spread messages, and convince us all that there is a lot more social media support for Trump than any of us thought.

Hillary

As Hillary Clinton’s email scandal grows, she does what comes naturally — attacks her enemies. By M.D. Kittle

Excerpt: Oh, at this point, I should also say Bill Clinton is right! The Black Lives Matter movement is not without its legitimate complaints and arguments -- I’m in favor of some criminal-justice reforms. But they want to work from the assumption that there are no black bad actors in this story. It’s white supremacy all the way down. The problem with this is that even if white supremacy -- whatever people mean by that -- is the massive problem some lefties imagine, it still doesn’t excuse bad individual moral choices. Excuses don’t become explanations simply because you shout them. It’s a very weird corollary to social-justice logic. If you see everyone simply as representatives of groups -- white oppressors and black victims -- you withdraw the moral agency from individual actors on both sides of the equation (which, technically speaking, is racist). White people become agents of oppression and morally culpable even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Black criminals who prey on innocent black people become victims, about whom no one can say an unkind word. One fun consequence of all this is that Bill very well could turn out to be a liability for Hillary, which would be kind of hilarious given that Hillary would be just another left-wing activist lawyer were it not for her husband. She rode her Arkansas mule all of the way to the White House gates only to see the sign reading, “No Mules Allowed.”

Excerpt: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday won the Wyoming Democratic caucuses to extend his winning streak, while GOP White House candidates compete for delegates in the Colorado state party convention.

Sanders had 56 percent of the vote, compared to 44 percent for primary frontrunner Hillary Clinton, with 96 percent of precincts reporting, according to the Associated Press, which called the race for Sanders.

Excerpt: In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring. (Here we go again. In 2008, the housing market collapsed because there were too many sub-prime loans to people whop couldn't pay that went into default, dragging the rest of the economy with it. Discrimination and red lining? Well, Dr. Thomas Sowell points out that both white and black banks gave loans at higher rates to whites than to blacks, based on credit histories and assets. And that black and white owned banks gave loans at higher rates to Asians than to whites, again based on credit histories and assets. Unless you think some cabal of Asians is controlling the banks to discriminate against whites. But politics matters, not facts. ~Bob

Excerpt: For years the Obama administration has been accused of micromanaging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from inside the White House. Now in an astonishing report from Fox News anchor Bret Baier, three former Obama Defense Secretaries are openly slamming him for his distrust of the military, his failure to lead and they're exposing his inexperienced and closest advisors for second guessing senior field commanders with phone calls to the battlefield. "President Obama, he's one of the youngest presidents we've ever had. One of the most inexperienced presidents we've ever had. He has a staff around him that is very inexperienced. I don't think there's one veteran on his senior staff at the White House. I don't believe there's one business person. I don't believe there is one person who's ever run anything. Other than Vice President Biden, none of them have ever been elected to anything. You must leven the loaf, leven your advisors where you get a lot of experience at difference things where he, the President himself, is so inexperienced," Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said. "I think he's got to fundamentally understand and I'm not sure he ever did nor people around him, the tremendous responsibility the United States has. Not to be the world's policemen, but to lead and we're the only ones who can. The world becomes more dangerous, not less dangerous, when America gets less involved in the world. I don't mean invading and occupying and imposing, but leading." (I am shocked, SHOCKED, to see this. Clearly these are just racist, political attacks on the President, by people with ulterior motives who cannot know what they're talking about. Obama is a brilliant man, who surrounded himself with other brilliant people, so they absolutely must have known what they were doing. Right? Sure, and the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny are out there too, doing good things for us. Interesting that things have finally progressed to where more former workers in the Administration are willing to come out and really tell it like it was and is. Too little, too late, but maybe the slow dawn of actual history about this presidency is just beginning. --Del)

The One Kind of Diversity Colleges Avoid. I’ve seen faculty searches up close. Somehow teachers with conservative views just don’t make the cut.

Excerpt: Yet, in my experience, no search committee has ever been instructed to increase political or ideological diversity. On the contrary, I have been involved in searches in which the chairman of the selection committee stated that no libertarian candidates would be considered. Or the description of the position was changed when the best résumés appeared to be coming from applicants with right-of-center viewpoints. Or in which candidates were dismissed because of their association with conservative or libertarian institutions. I doubt that my experience is unusual. According to data compiled by the Higher Education Research Institute, only 12% of university faculty identify as politically right of center, and these are mainly professors in schools of engineering and other professional schools.

Excerpt: How do we hate Obama’s treatment of the press? Let me count the ways. Under his administration, the U.S. government has set a new record for withholding Freedom of Information Act requests, according to a recent Associated Press investigation. FOIA gives the public and press an irreplaceable view into the workings of the executive branch. Without timely release of government documents and data, vital questions can’t be answered and stories can’t be written. Obama’s “Insider Threat Program” has turned employees across the government—from the Peace Corps to the Social Security Administration to the Department of Agriculture—into information-squelching snitches. If this isn’t Trumpian behavior, I don’t know what is.

Excerpt: U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder has lost her mind over a tiny little cross. The smallest hint of Christianity–historically accurate or not–must not survive the Jacobin purge of all things religious from the public square. In 1957, the seal of the County of Los Angeles included a cross above the Hollywood Bowl. It was barely noticeable unless you were looking for it. Then in 2004, a group of thin-skinned jackasses who are offended because a county named “The Angels” had a seal depicting the symbol of the Christians who founded it threatened to sue.

Interesting: Herbert Hoover: Father of the New Deal. By Steven Horwitz

Excerpt: Politicians and pundits portray Herbert Hoover as a defender of laissez faire governance whose dogmatic commitment to small government led him to stand by and do nothing while the economy collapsed in the wake of the stock market crash in 1929. In fact, Hoover had long been a critic of laissez faire. As president, he doubled federal spending in real terms in four years. He also used government to prop up wages, restricted immigration, signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, raised taxes, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation—all interventionist measures and not laissez faire. Unlike many Democrats today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisers knew that Hoover had started the New Deal. One of them wrote, “When we all burst into Washington … we found every essential idea [of the New Deal] enacted in the 100-day Congress in the Hoover administration itself.” (Yes. See: Tariff disaster offers a lesson on the folly of protectionism. By Thomas Sowell

Excerpt: The revelations of the so-called Panama Papers that are roiling the world’s political and financial elites this week include important facts about Team Clinton. Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, DC. CEO is Tony Podesta, one of the best-connected Democratic machers in the country. He founded the firm in 1998 with his brother John, formerly chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, then counselor to President Barack Obama, Mr. Podesta is the very definition of a Democratic insider.

Interesting: Despite The Disruptors, This Election Has A Predictable End. By David Davenport

Excerpt: If the 2016 presidential campaign were a movie, it would be “Year of the Disruptors.” The outsiders and disruptors have dominated the Republican race from the beginning, but now we are essentially down to two very different disruptors: Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. One of the two Democratic finalists, Bernie Sanders, is yet another kind of disruptor, leaving only Hillary Clinton as a classic establishment candidate. The American voters are frustrated and would like to deliver a message through these several disruptor candidates but, in the end, they will not want a disruptor for president, so (spoiler alert) Hillary will win.

Excerpt: Those aren’t the words but the spirit of what a group of Stanford students is saying to classmates who are “elitist” and “racist” enough to want to study Western history. In February the editors of the Stanford Review, an independent campus publication, published embracing Western values and announcing a petition to put Western civilization back into the core curriculum. Stanford abolished that course in 1988, a year after Jesse Jackson marched students around campus chanting against the topic. Currently Stanford offers the class to a tiny fraction of its 7,000 students. The only Western civilization survey course is carefully locked away inside the “Structured Liberal Education” (SLE) program, where a cohort of 90 students opt to study the liberal arts.

Of Course: Danny Glover: ‘Societies Must Apologize’ for Slavery with Reparations

Excerpt: Actor and activist Danny Glover called on international leaders to “apologize” for the enslavement of African-Americans in the past through reparations for descendants. “I call upon you today as policy representatives and socially conscious citizens, public servants of our countries guided by personal ethics, religions, faith and/or official oath of office to avow a commitment to democracy, justice, equality and human rights. The call today for reparatory justice for Afro-descendants is an imperative for expanded democracy and spiritual and material well-being. (Racist. What about all the Irish and other minorities/ethnicities that were indentured servants/slaves/bonded? Get a grip. Regime has handed out plenty of taxpayer $$ already for reparations but never enough....and when it is all gone, then what folks? --Barb. Before Western Civilization turned against it, every society practiced slavery. Some still do. Dr. Thomas Sowell points out that in the same period when 500,000 black Africans were sold by other blacks to white slavers and brought to North America, 1,000,000 white Europeans were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa. And probably more blacks than that, but they didn't keep records and the only survivors were those pretty enough to be in harems and have kids. ~Bob)

New Top Cop's Fiancee Under Investigation For Alleged Police Exam Cheating

Excerpt: Mayor Rahm Emanuel's newly appointed interim top cop Eddie Johnson's fiancee is a Chicago Police lieutenant named in an investigation into alleged cheating on the department's lieutenant's exam, DNAinfo Chicago has learned. It's the same cheating probe that sources said helped derail Deputy Chief Eugene Williams' chances of being promoted to police superintendent. Now the allegations are part of a separate probe, this one by the city's Inspector General Joe Ferguson, sources said. (Rahm Emanuel must be okay--Trump contributed something like $50k to him. Making Chicago great again, I guess. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Dane County Circuit Court Judge William Foust on Friday struck down Wisconsin’s year-old right-to-work law, asserting that labor unions have a property right to employees’ wages. That argument has been rejected by multiple courts and right-to-work proponents say they will appeal the judge’s decision. “We are extremely disappointed that the DaneCounty Circuit Court struck down Wisconsin’s right-to-work law, but we are confident the law will be upheld on appeal,” state Attorney General Brad Schimel said. (Keep your own money? That's un-American! ~Bob)

Excerpt: Lamar Harris had seven felony convictions and 43 arrests when he shot three Chicago police officers. The same week, Samuel Harviley, who had just been paroled after serving less than half of his sentence for armed carjacking, shot yet another of the Windy City’s finest....Ex-cons well-known to police and with a proven propensity for violence are being let out early from prison or let off lightly by judges, only to wreak havoc on the city, they say.

Excerpt: Not unlike the Climate Treaty Obama signed lasts summer, there is now in the works a similar treaty which will give vast control of the world’s oceans over to the U.N. This move will once again grant to the U.N. authority that the Constitution forbids.

Excerpt: In what could go down as one of the most honest moments in political history, Brown told reporters that raising the minimum wage was more about culture and politics than about economics. “Economically, minimum wages may not make sense,” Brown says in a video posted online by the Sacramento Bee newspaper. “But morally, and socially and politically, they make every sense because it binds the community together.” (So the poor lose their low paying jobs and don't develop basic job skills. But they'll be bound together by welfare. Until the fiscal collapse. ~Bob)

Excerpt: A retired four-star general could land on November's presidential ballot if one group of conservatives has its way. Gen. James Mattis, who retired in 2013 after a 44-year career with the Marines, has been the subject of a movement with roots among billionaire conservatives who do not want to see GOP front-runner Donald Trump or Texas Sen. Ted Cruz win the presidency. According to The Daily Beast, the movement seems to be picking up steam as a Plan B, should Trump be nominated by the GOP in Cleveland, conservatives would then swing behind Mattis and press him to run as a third-party candidate. (Probably no shot at it, but damn, I'd vote for him in a split second! He'd HAVE to be better than anyone else running now. --Del. Wish Jim Webb would run third party. Takes a lot of cash and vols to get on the ballot, but maybe one of the mino0rity parties could be a vehicle. ~Bob)

Excerpt: James Harrison, history professor at PortlandCommunity College, said in a lecture Monday for the college’s April Whiteness History Month that peace in the U.S. is impossible so long as whiteness still exists. In a talk entitled “Imagine A World Without Whiteness,” Harrison declared confidently conflict can only cease once the power structure of whiteness is totally eliminated. (Black prof. Show me your shocked face. --Barb. Imaging is a white prof had said a world without blackness...~Bob)

Excerpt: The United Nations has launched a far-reaching initiative that could give U.N.-sponsored authorities sway over the biological resources of the high seas—all the waters that lie outside national territories and economic zones. The potential shift in power involves multi-trillion-dollar issues, such as whether large areas—conceivably, as much as 30 percent-- of the world’s international waters should be designated as no-go areas to protect biological diversity; whether and how to require elaborate “environmental impact assessments” for future ocean development projects; and how to divide up the economic benefits from the future development of “marine genetic resources.”...Overall, the hoped-for treaty will cover “two-thirds of the oceans, almost half the planet,” says Lisa Speer, a senior official of the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which is in turn a lead member of a squadron of 33 environmentalist groups banded together as the High Seas Alliance to lobby for protectionist measures during the talks.

Excerpt: The Justice Department said Friday that it had given to Congress additional documents related to the botched gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious. The Obama administration had for the last four years refused to provide the records to House Republicans, invoking a claim of executive privilege. But a federal judge in January turned aside that argument, saying a blanket assertion of executive privilege was inappropriate since the Justice Department had already disclosed through other channels much of the information it had sought to withhold. (Too little, too late; massive stonewalling technique successful by Exec branch/DOJ/Regime. Many have died. Will Obama cry alligator tears? --Barb)

Religion of Peace News

‘It was a children’s soccer game. Of course he knew he was going to kill children.’

Excerpt: A lie conceals the truth. And hidden truths never have a chance of being acknowledged, addressed, and ultimately ameliorated. Because of this simple truism, one of the greatest lies of our age -- that violence committed in the name of Islam has nothing to do with Islam -- has made an intrinsically weak Islam the scourge of the modern world, with no signs of relief on the horizon. ( "I have been made victorious through terror" (Bukhari 4.52.220) --Mohammad. ~Bob)

Excerpt: In early 2014, I was in a small meeting with a high-ranking Obama administration official who was involved in counterterrorism. When asked, he made several candid assertions: Al-Qaeda was never on the run. The President’s terrorism experts never told him it was. They were mystified by his 2012 campaign claims that seemed to the contrary.

Excerpt: ... Robert Spencer, author of the Jihad Watch blog at the DavidHorowitzFreedomCenter, said four separate and independent studies since 1998 have found that 80 percent of mosques in the U.S. preach hatred of Jews and Christians and the need ultimately to impose Shariah law here. As the Muslim population has grown, the number of mosques sprouting in the U.S. has multiplied by 15-fold since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, going from just 200 on 9/11 to between 2,500 and 3,000 today. A 2011 study by Mordechai Kedar and David Yerushalmi found that only 19 percent of U.S. mosques preached no violence whatsoever. (What an absurd system we have! Where I teach ESL, the preponderance of students with green cards are from the Middle East, about half of them Muslim with mediocre to low education. I teach the advanced class, 85%of whom are here on student visas (working to support themselves), who are dying to stay here. All of my students have been to college, about half are grads and some of those have advanced degrees. The Muslims I have taught are all from former USSRs. Every single one of my students, even those who have picked up PC notions about global warming and the like, are rabid proponents of the American way and our Constitution (at least the way I have introduced it). Instead our laws (under the Kennedy reforms of the 1960s) have worked out to attract and multiply the influx of undesirables and hostiles. Give us people who buy into our values, who are committed to mastering (not just learning) English, who will boost the economy, who will not become chronic dependents, and most of all, want to enter our culture, not overturn it. Cordially, Larry Greenberg)

Excerpt: Islamic State executed 175 of the 300 Syrian cement workers it captured near the Syrian capital of Damascus. The workers from Al-Badiyeh Cement company, based in the town of Al-Dhmeir 30 miles northeast of Damascus, were reportedly taken from their workplace Thursday and put on buses by ISIS militants. It is believed ISIS staged the execution in an area where its militants were previously fighting forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad.